To Span the Sea of Time

For most of my time on InterVarsity staff so far, I've often felt like I'm drowning; drowning in a sea of seemingly endless and dead-ended fund raising, drowning in having no idea how to meaningfully do anything on campus at Hillsdale, drowning in a sea of incapabilities to connect with students on some level, and drowning, perhaps overall, in a sea of personal failings and inadequacies.

I've told myself, all along, and not incorrectly, that I can cling to God, cling to his promises, cling to the knowledge that he wouldn't call me to something he wouldn't equip me to accomplish.  Cling is, most certainly, the most useful verb.  It comes and goes in waves, the thoughts that I can't even dream to have what it takes to be a "good" staffworker.  Largely though, I've probably been more in line with thinking I'm desperately skill-less than like I'm on the divinely appointed mission I, come to find out, actually am on and have been on from the beginning.

I realized today that we, I, probably pray the wrong way a lot.  Maybe I'm wrong in thinking and saying this, but it seems to me that we shouldn't pray for God's will in our lives as much as we should pray for his will in the world and pray that we would be used by him to accomplish it.  Maybe that's splitting hairs, but "thy Kingdom come, thy will be done; on Earth as it is in Heaven" doesn't even mention one's own life and work.  It's probably the least we can do, to pray in the same direction as Jesus.

So somehow, and I probably know less now than I did this time two years ago, going into my senior year at Wooster, God's got me on InterVarsity staff as part of his divine mission to redeem creation.  It's so heavy.  It's so true.  It's so much the only thing I can be doing with my life.  It's also so small, so meticulous, that my small striving in a small school is somehow interwoven with the eternity of all of everything.  But it is.  I believe it is.  Human's can't create their own grand-narrative theory because we're by nature full of holes.  But God fills them.  I don't know how, I just know he does, and I'd rather have faith in that than try to figure things out on my own, try to create a box by which to understand God and whatever it is he's doing.  I probably can't comprehend it and I'm ready to give up trying.  I'll simply be, and I will participate in this wondrous rush toward eternity.  Because he is Love, and deep down, love never fails.

-Zack

"But suddenly now I know where I belong
It's many hundred miles and it won't be long"
-Ben Gibbard and Feist